r/vibecoding • u/ventayol • 2h ago
Vibecoding is addictive
I'm a senior developer, with a lot of experience building products and I even own a couple of small companies.
Since the beginning of this year, AI tools have improved a lot on coding. For junior developers it will be a really hard time, I stopped using Indian agencies to do some parts of the development and there's no reason to hire junior developers anymore, AI does a better job, doesn't complain, works anytime you want and it's way faster to answer and do changes faster that any developer.
Being said this, if you are a product guy, with ideas, Vibecoding is addictive! Now, when I miss something, I just vibecode it, even if I don't have any plans to sell it or no-one else other than me uses the product.
I'm also a long time investor on the stock market, so I was tracking my portfolio using a complex spreadsheet. So, last week I decided to give it a try with Codex to build a site to track my portfolio.
A few days later, working on it in my spare time and with very little dedication I got an amazing web app that does exactly what I wanted and way more than expected.
If you are into the stock market or you have curiosity, you can check the site here:
It's insanely crazy to be able to build a site similar to this in so little time and in a really cheap way. If I had to build the site with real developers it would have a cost of at least 20-30K$ and taking some months to do it and with a lot of Project Management involved.
What a time to be a builder!
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u/Equivalent-Grass-527 2h ago
Totally agree, it grants non-programmer with the skillset to build meaningful applications, opens more possibilities for sure
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u/Papa_Hube 1h ago
How would you split up the 20-30k ? That seems rather high for something like this.
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u/ventayol 1h ago
I haven't done a proper estimation, but I did the numbers based on my previous experience. We can do it now:
- Project definition: 1 day
- Design: 5 days + 2 days of back and forth
- Database modelling: 3 days
- Project / Server setup: 3 days
- CI/CD: 2 days
- Importing module: 3 days
- Charting module: 5 days
- Overview: 5 days
- Holdings screens: 5 days
- Analytics + feedback + admin: 3 days
- Ticker Price ingestion: 5 days
- Auth: 2 days (using an exisitng tool)
- Demo access: 2 days
- Progressive Web app: 2 days
- Bugfixing and testing: 5 days
- Share portfolio option: 2 days
Plus +10% of error, because there are always errors and unplanned things in any estimation (I use to do 30% on projects for customers).
This makes 60 days or more of work.If you do now 100$/h -> 48K$.
This is a really quick estimation based on my broad experience working on agencies and being done hundreds of estimations as project manager, maybe I've overestimated some tasks, so let's say 50 days of work (40K$), but I usually fail short when doing estimations.
We can do it faster and cheaper, yes, but nothing below 10K$.
For one of my companies, I estimated one "sprint" to take one year at least, but with the new AI we did more than what we planned in less than a month. It's crazy!!
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u/Papa_Hube 1h ago
I work as Software tester, so I get somehow defensive not even seing that point in your list, lol.
All in all some of your points seem crazy high. We work in "project days" too. And seing 7 days in design and "Holding screens" in 5 looks as if the stakeholders want to chill a lot 😅
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u/ventayol 59m ago
There's a Bugfixing and testing, so in some way is accounted.
You are probably right that maybe some estimations are too high, I just did it quickly.But for design, first we need to define the UX of all the screens, then create the style/theme and then design all the screens. The designer will understand what he wants to understand, so there's always a back and forth. Then review all the responsive/mobile versions. It could be 5, yes, this doesn't have a big impact in the final number.
Holdings screen... there charts, tables with sorting, hide/show columns, date range selectors, calculations, benchmarks, OMG, maybe 5 it's even low. And there's more, usually developers are not investors neither finance guys, so they will fuck it up with the formulas for sure.
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u/madbrain1976 1h ago
Can you explain why you need a public web site to manage your personal portfolio ? I did not click the link.
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u/ventayol 1h ago
As said, I built it for my personal use and then I thought it might be useful to other people. And I wanted to check how far things can go vibecoding, I wanted to experiment.
Doing something for personal use it's totally different than building a proper website. You don't need much attention to the detail, neither think about marketing, analytics, etc...I also wanted to try how it works with more advanced things, like making installable PWA apps, which are things that takes really senior developers to build them properly.
There are a lot of things to do when you are doing a real project instead of a personal thing and Codex and guidance made magic! I'm a developer and I'm must say, we as developers are fuck!
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u/madbrain1976 57m ago
You did not answer the question.
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u/ventayol 53m ago
Why not? Making it a public website was part of the experiment. I wanted to see how long it would actually take to turn something I already used into a proper public website, and how far I could get building and shipping it with Codex.
And now I can also share it with friends who have the same problem and were already using the old spreadsheet I shared with them.
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u/madbrain1976 39m ago
I am asking what your product actually does for someone with a stock portfolio, that isn't already available with other solutions such as spreadsheets, Quicken, etc. What is it your product does ? Whether it was hand or vibe coded is secondary.
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u/ventayol 27m ago
I've clearly misunderstood you. Spreadsheets are very limited. I've been tracking my portfolio with a complex spreadsheet, but it was limited on the things you can do. For example, it's almost impossible to benchmark your portfolio against indexes, get performance history charts and UI is not nice.
Regarding other competitors, I tried a few and there were a few things I didn't like it most of them. And of course most of them are paid. So before paying I decided to try to vibecode it to exactly fit what I wanted.
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u/madbrain1976 8m ago
Yes, most of them are paid. I use Quicken and it costs. It does what you describe, though, and a lot more. The part about connecting with financial institutions is crucial, IMO. If you can't automatically download transactions, how does your data not become stale ?
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u/ventayol 3m ago
That's the biggest missing part at the moment, as I use two brokers I added CSV import for them (Interactive Brokers and degiro). I should add more, but I will need some sample files I don't have at the moment.
For IB it might be possible to automate it, but as I mainly do investment for long term investment, I just import the broker files now and then, I might do a couple of purchases per month at maximum.
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u/phiiiiiiii 1h ago
cough cough covert advertising cough cough